KEEPING LONDON 'ZIEGFELD' AFLOAT WITH COSMETICS AND FAST WORDS

By BENEDICT NIGHTINGALE, Special to the New York Times

Published: August 11, 1988

LONDON, Aug. 10—
Most of the London critics have so far not enjoyed their second viewing of the musical ''Ziegfeld'' much more than they did their first. One leading reviewer summed up its reworking, its restaging and the replacement in the title role of Len Cariou by the Israeli actor Topol as ''rearranging the furniture on the Titanic.''

Yet Harold Fielding, the show's producer, remains determined to keep his troubled vessel afloat. He says the paying public will ignore the newspapers, and he is continuing to sell seats at the London Palladium into next January. He's also still talking of an American production.

Mr. Fielding has long admitted feeling a personal affinity with Florenz Ziegfeld, ''the greatest showman in my field.'' Mr. Fielding has produced more than 35 musicals in London, including ''Sweet Charity,'' ''On the 20th Century'' and ''Barnum,'' and several have been extravagantly staged. His epic version of ''Gone With the Wind'' at Drury Lane culminated in a spectacular burning of Atlanta.

Mr. Fielding has also pulled plenty of publicity stunts in his 45-year career. When Ginger Rogers arrived to play ''Mame,'' he hired a special train to bring her from Southampton to London, furnishing it with a movie theater showing her old movies and packing it with reporters. Opening With Hyperbole

So it wasn't surprising that the opening of ''Ziegfeld'' on April 26 was accompanied by more than the usual razzmatazz. Mr. Fielding was quoted as describing it as ''the most spectacular show I've ever produced.'' Its budget was officially said to be about $5.5 million, an astonishing sum for a city where production costs are commonly half that or less.

The British entertainment pages were full of reorts that sounded sensational. The cast of 60 would be wearing 450 costumes, one of them encrusted with 18,000 beads. Scenery and costumes alone would cost as much as the entire London production of ''The Phantom of the Opera.'' Women in the show were required to sign contracts promising not to get fat or dye their hair. And Mr. Fielding was so confident of success that he had put $4 million of his own money into the musical and taken a five-year lease on the London Palladium.

Then the critics struck, or most of them did. True, the respected Irving Wardle of The Times admired the show, calling it ''a remarkable stylistic achievement.'' He thought it told Ziegfeld's life story effectively; he enjoyed the music, most of which had been culled from Ziegfeld shows, and he declared that Len Cariou was ''ideally cast'' as Ziegfeld. His colleagues were less generous, however.

Michael Billington of The Guardian summed up the show as ''expensive nothingness.'' Michael Coveney of The Financial Times called it ''a sad litany of disconnected items.'' Jack Tinker of The Daily Mail found fault with almost everything and everyone, from a plot resembling ''a great hole'' to Mr. Cariou, whom he accused of ''such bland self-effacement that it amounts to anonymity.'' ''Brains should be checked in with the coats,'' he concluded. Differences in London

In New York such notices might have dimmed the show's box-office potential, but in London critics are less influential and word of mouth is more important. Moreover, ''Ziegfeld'' had taken a healthy advance of $3.5 million at the box office. Mr. Fielding says now that he thought of folding the show. But he was extracting Ziegfeld-like publicity for his defiance of the critics, flamboyantly describing his determination to carry on as ''the biggest gamble in Britain's show business history.''

But he was convinced that radical changes were needed fast. In Mr. Cariou, who starred on Broadway in the title role of Stephen Sondheim's ''Sweeney Todd,'' he felt he had too weighty and serious a performer as Ziegfeld, a part he had originally penciled in for Richard Chamberlain. So Mr. Cariou was, in Mr. Fielding's words, ''invited to withdraw,'' and within three weeks he did. After the curtain fell on the night of May 14, Mr. Cariou reportedly turned to the cast on stage and said: ''I want to wish you goodbye. I have been fired.'' For the next two months, Mr. Cariou's understudy, Marc Urquhart, played Ziegfeld. A New Director

By May 16 the cast also had a second director, replacing Joe Layton, the American who had left Britain just after the opening. The newcomer was an old trouper: Tommy Steele, a veteran of many Fielding shows. He had seen ''Ziegfeld'' and concluded, he said, that ''it's 80 percent marvelous but 20 percent awfully wrong.'' He phoned the producer's office offering his help, then turned up with five pages of suggestions.

In several weeks of intensive work, the cast often found itself rehearsing new material during the day and performing old in the evening. In came several songs and a military tap-dance accompanied by George M. Cohan's ''Over There.'' Out went several other numbers, including Noel Coward's ''Half-Caste Woman'' and its dancing slaves and a boat. Scenes were introduced, rejected, shifted and reorganized, and the running time was cut from three hours to just over two and a half. Topol Comes Aboard

Beverley Cross, the playwright who wrote ''Half a Sixpence'' for Mr. Fielding, came in to help adapt the book. And the search intensified for a star whose charisma could fill the 2,300-seat Palladium. Mr. Fielding's first idea was Howard Keel. But it was Topol who agreed in early July to accept a six-month contract and a salary reported to be $3,500 a week.

Meanwhile, ''Ziegfeld'' acquired a third director, Wendy Toye, another long-term Fielding associate. When Mr. Steele left for an engagement abroad, she took over slotting the star into the company and adjusting the production around him. It was a substantially new show that reopened at the Palladium last week. Only the critical reception was familiar. Result of the Changes

The Daily Telegraph thought the show marginally improved. But Mr. Tinker of The Daily Mail described it as ''a ludicrously expensive clothesline on which to hang a string of elaborate spectacles,'' and Kenneth Hurren of The Mail on Sunday was moved to compare it with the sinking Titanic. Yet Mr. Fielding had, he says, already decided that success would come, not from better reviews, but from marketing the show both to American tourists and to ''English people who like good escapist entertainment, people who will come in the trainloads and busloads from Birmingham and Manchester.'' He predicted that heavy advertising and Topol's reputation would make business ''build and build.''

And why not? Since Mr. Fielding spent less than he expected on the show before its original opening, he says, the reworking has not added significantly to its budget. Since he was taking $170,000 a week with an understudy in the main role, he can, he thinks, soon reach the break-even figure of $250,000 a week with a star. In any case, he regards ''Ziegfeld'' as a prospective earner of dollars and yen.

''It's a product for export,'' he said. ''Even if it doesn't recoup its costs here, it could play dates across America and take vast sums of money. I'm now in active negotiation with two groups of New York producers. There's great interest there, and in Japan, and in Australia. . . .''